29 posts categorized "Editors love this!"

March 30, 2009

1. FlowingData is a well-designed and -organized online locale which helps readers

...explore how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are
using data to understand ourselves better—mainly through data
visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and
personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we
understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make
sense of it all.

2. The Addictionary is a social word site. Users make up words, create definitions for made-up words, vote on other users' humorous wordy concoctions, and connect to others who enjoy doing the same. From their "About Us" page:

The Addictionary is a site for word lovers and those who like to see
our beloved English language grow in serious or humorous ways. We built
the Addictionary to empower word-play and to help lovers of word-play
showcase and market their cleverness and creativity to the world...

If you add a word or definition to the site, drop a comment here. I'll post a link to it so other readers can check it out.

August 28, 2008

Learning to write well is a continual process. When readers ask me about how to become a better writer, I always say, "First, write every day." And I mean it. With writing, the only way to get better at it is to keep at it. Writing doesn't improve just by thinking about it.

Then I give this advice: "When you write, don't worry about misspellings and grammatical errors. That's what editors are for." Writing and editing are completely different skills. Great writers often make spelling and grammar errors, and great editors and/or proofreaders are often better at catching mistakes than creating compelling stories.

When writing for our jobs, however, we must often be both writer and editor extraordinaire. Also, if you are a blogger and don't have anyone else to review your work before you post, then occasionally reviewing lists like these from TechRepublic Senior Editor Jody Gilbert can help you catch your own errors:

June 27, 2008

The most typically inspiring words to writers focus on growing wings, dreaming big and believing hard enough. This grounding, practical advice stresses working within confines and structure first; the wings follow.

Rules abound in writing—enough for everyone to follow some and ignore others.

Swiss graphic design and new media student Clément Gallet lays
it all out it his new communication manifesto “ritN eng iz ded”. In it,
he posits that the speed of communication is moving too fast for our
traditional written word system, and he gives suggestions on how to
streamline language to work better with our new communication methods:
texting, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter.

One very successful novel has already been written completely in SMS. What will written language look like in 50 years if society's fast pace and technology's insistence on brevity win out?

October 25, 2007

Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You, was looking at Amazon.com's new "Text Stats" feature on one of his book's pages. Two stats caught his eye: "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words". He began to experiment with these stats, plugging those of various authors into a spreadsheet of his own; he then saw how they fell on a graph.

Steven Johnson has done some interesting (but not surprising) research
on the complexity of the work of a few writers. Basically, short,
simple sentences not only sell more books, but spread ideas farther and
faster.

In addition to the above, these points most interested me:

1. Amazon's new "Text Stats" feature is located under the "Inside This Book" subhead on each book's page. Look for it the next time you're on an Amazon book page. Compare your favorite authors. Are you attracted to a certain sentence length and word complexity?

2. Johnson found that, when comparing authors to their own books and also to other authors' books:

...in that cluster, each
author's books are closer to his other books than they are to the other
two author's books. In other words, each of us has a certain sweet spot
of complexity that we come back to book after book.

Godin likens this consistent sentence length throughout many books to an author's fingerprint.

3. If you're participating in National Novel Writing Month, try to vary your sentence length as you write. This should NOT, however, be your first priority — you're just trying to bang out that sloppy, imperfect, 50,000-word first draft in 30 days, remember? But if you do catch yourself writing and writing and realize that a sentence you're creating is about to swallow you whole, stop. Breathe. Wrap it up. Move on.

September 27, 2007

"...the lowly comma, correctly used quotes and other proper uses of periods, semicolons and the ever-mysterious ellipse."

For the kids, there's Punctuation Playtime, an educational workshop that visits elementary schools around the world. The holiday even has an "official meatloaf" in the shape of a question mark (photo and recipe PDF available on the NPD site).

I'm writing this in my calendar for next year. Here's wishing you and yours a happy, belated National Punctuation Day!

April 04, 2007

I love learning how words relate to each other. While I'm happy any old day just reading the dictionary (I'm serious), it's refreshing to see other formats for explaining what words mean.

Earlier today, I stumbled across the Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary. I had a lot of fun typing in words and phrases, then seeing how the words and their associations floated and bounced across my screen. Above is an excerpt of the image map for "create." To see how wide its map goes, go to the Visuwords site and type it in for yourself.

I'll definitely use this when I want more than just a standard line definition. It's very playful, and I think this characteristic helps when people are brainstorming. Playfulness keeps their thought processes more open to different possibilities.

From the Visuwords™ site:

• It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus!• Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.• The online dictionary is available wherever there's an Internet connection.• No membership required.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s
WordNet, an open-source
database built by University students and language researchers. Combined
with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern
web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons
of the web.

March 15, 2007

Apologies to Barbra Streisand, but this illustration from Jessica Hagy's genius blog "Indexed" brought back quite a few memories. One dominated: my high school English teacher for sophomore year, forever trying to seem cool and keep our attention, made jokes about "dangling elements" every day that she taught us about sentence diagramming.

Yes, that's right: every day. She must have thought that none of us were listening. But that's not why we weren't laughing. There are jokes getting old, and there are jokes getting ancient. These were prehistoric. When I taught English, I never made such agonizingly corny jokes. See? I was listening.

This illustration's title is "Predicated on whatever." The comment thread associated with this post is a fascinating commentary on what is, and isn't, taught in school.

If you like Jessica's diagram, check out more at her blog. She's also just gotten a book deal! It's amazing what a little high-quality ink-on-paper can do...congratulations, Ms. Indexed!

Hello and welcome!

My name is Kristin Gorski. I'm a doctoral candidate in instructional technology and media. My research focuses on technology and literacies, writing in digital spaces, and how media literacy may support academic literacy (among other incredibly interesting topics). On occasion, I’m also a freelance writer and editor. “Write now is good.” is my personal blog about writing, creativity and inspiration (with healthy doses of technology in relevant places). I started it in blogging's heyday (2006) and still post to it, time permitting. If you'd like to collaborate on a project, have writing/technology/creativity info to share, or want to say, "Hi," contact me at kgwritenow (at) yahoo dot com.
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